


for bonny sweet robin is all my joy

by brella



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-16 17:18:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1355455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/brella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia blinks slowly, like she’s not yet fully awake and she isn’t sure if he’s there.</p><p>"You’re dead," she tells him simply.</p>
            </blockquote>





	for bonny sweet robin is all my joy

**Author's Note:**

> Cross-posted from Tumblr, [here](http://caseyblevins.co.vu/post/79634374422/stydia-hamlet-ophelia-kind-of-thing-i-loved-ophelia).

"I don’t know what any of this means," Stiles whispers, hating it, hating that he has to admit ignorance to the smartest girl he’s ever known and probably ever will know. She sits beside him on the grass, her red hair wild and wind-tangled, plucking the petals off of a yellow carnation. "I’m… I lied to you, you know. When I said I didn’t…" 

He can’t finish; he’s never been able to no matter how many times he’s tried. It doesn’t matter now, he guesses, and Eichen House is nice enough in the spring, even if there isn’t a lot of space to walk around in outdoors that isn’t part of the building itself.

"Where’d you find all these?" he asks quietly, nodding to the scattering of flowers around them that she’d brought out from her room. 

"Oh, you know," she replies vaguely. "Anywhere. All over." 

"They all mean something, right?" Stiles prods her. "That’s why you gave me this one." 

He holds up the pale, now withered rue flower she’d crammed into his hands the night her parents had checked her in, and Lydia finally lifts her eyes away from her shaking fingers, tilting her head to examine the crushed petals. She nods after a time with a quiet “mmhmm,” and her gaze meets his, and Stiles loses all the breath inside of him. 

"And what, uh…" He swallows over the stone lodged in his throat. "What… would that be? The meaning." 

Lydia blinks slowly, like she’s not yet fully awake and she isn’t sure if he’s there.

"You’re dead," she tells him simply. 

Stiles shakes his head. “I’m not. It  _tricked_  you, Lydia; it tricked you into thinking I was. But I’m not.”

"They told me you were dying," she continues like he hadn’t spoken. "The voices. And I saw you. I saw you dead."

"That wasn’t me," Stiles insists, the way he has a hundred times with no response. "It’s a  _trickster spirit_ , Lydia—”

"Nothing tricks me," she interjects, and when she jerks her chin to face him again, contempt flares in her pale eyes. Her voice trembles, and her teeth grind against each other, but still she manages to insist, "I don’t. Get.  _Tricked_.” 

Stiles closes his mouth, silencing the words jumbling on his tongue and breaking the eye contact, looking down at the grass beneath them. He closes his hand around the rue. The sweat from his palm is going to destroy it even more.

"It makes sense that I’d see you," Lydia whispers. "If I can  _hear_  the dead, why shouldn’t I be able to see them, right?” 

A breeze moves slowly through the trees, far off, and drags a silence along behind it. 

"What did you lie about?" she asks him quietly, after a long time. 

Stiles shakes his head. “When I said I didn’t, um…”  _Have a crush on you since the third grade anymore_.

"It’s okay," Lydia murmurs softly when he can’t finish. She reaches a hand over tentatively like she’s about to take his, but then she thinks the better of it, probably expecting it not to be there for her fingers to graze. "I understand."

"No, you don’t." Stiles’s voice is almost silent, so she doesn’t hear him, going back to her flowers, stroking their stems and humming to herself. And it feels  _wrong_ , that Lydia should ever not understand something.

"Here you go," she tells him, extending a bit of wormwood, its round budded blossoms yellow and rough.

Stiles takes it. His room has so many vases, now, with dead flowers and alive flowers and withering flowers and flowers he can’t bring himself to research the meaning of, but he knows this one; his mom had taught it to him.  _Bitterest sorrow_.  _Reminder of absence_. 

"Visiting hours are over," the orderly says a few minutes later. "Will we be seeing you again tomorrow, Mr. Stilinski?" 

Lydia stands before him, barefoot, and pads over to the brick patio leading back into the building. She slips her white flats on at the door. Stiles aches to follow her, but he stands still, absentmindedly running one finger along the scar on his stomach where a hundred flies had flown out. 

"Yeah," he answers, watching strawberry blonde flicker and fade into the crowd. "Probably."

**Author's Note:**

> [Plant symbolism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_symbolism) list on Wikipedia.


End file.
